


Accession

by rageprufrock



Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-25
Updated: 2015-06-01
Packaged: 2018-03-25 18:11:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 15,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3820024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rageprufrock/pseuds/rageprufrock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The act or process by which someone rises to a powerful and important position.</p><p>Harry clutches the tumbler closer to his chest in defense. "The last English monarch to ride into battle was Richard III, C." </p><p>"They located his remains, Harry, and his scoliosis wouldn't have been too noticeable in armor," C says, with a total lack of sympathy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Harry's in Dubai when he gets the first message. He's in the middle of working a possible informant, and he never gets around to listening to it. 

The second message comes while he's en route on an Emirates flight to Shanghai; Harry knows enough about aviation, cellular signals and whatever tech Merlin's put on his phone he never bothers to put it in flight mode. Still, he's sat next to a particularly wet eyed schoolgirl on this flight, and it just seems safer to sleep the whole time.

The third message isn't a message, proper. It's a text from Bloody Cousin Bertie, bane of Harry's childhood and idiot kinsman he'd been happily well shot of as soon as he'd joined the marines.

_Abdicating. Sorry, Hars. Bertie._

Harry's been informed by Control that texting during meetings will result in summary dismemberment. Also, the country's better off with Bertie removed from the line of succession in any context, even if he's being unnecessarily dramatic, so he waits until he's at dinner later that night — it's steak, nearly raw, and very good cognac — to text back, _Well done then, Bertie. - H._

* * *

In reality, Harry doesn't get the message until almost a month after the sortie in Dubai. He's freshly returned from Turkey, where he'd had a series of unsuccessful interludes set in Hagia Sofia. Everybody's being relentlessly, infuriatingly coy, and when Harry shores up back in London it's directly to Control's office and then directly to his silver drinks trolly for a tumbler and the Macallan 18. 

"If you're planning to rake me over the coals, you needn't bother," he assures C, who lounges behind the mahogany beast of his desk with all the patience of a jungle cat. "Merlin booked me an economy return flight from Istanbul, leaving me sufficiently punished for any number of perceived transgressions."

C just continues to stare, flat, watches Harry fill his glass, and waves affirmation when asked if Harry might take a seat.

"You're being unusually quiet," Harry says, once the Macallan is warming him from the stomach outward. 

"You've not been following the domestic news, have you," C says, but it's not a question, so much as confirmation. 

Harry raises an eyebrow. "I've been occupied." 

"Yes, of course," C allows, but now he moves, leans forward to rest his elbows on the desk and his palms flat. He looks grim and dutiful, and Harry sets down his tumbler, puts it aside and braces himself for whatever is coming — whatever must be done, as he has for years now, since he made his oaths. "Harry, do you remember the discussion from your recruitment?"

There had been many discussions around Harry's recruitment, borderline unusual as it had been. 

"I've had a lot of head injuries since then, C," Harry prevaricates. 

"Many of which you've childishly concealed to avoid medical treatment, even, so I'll indulge it," C replies, arch, and laces his fingers together, stares down his beaky nose at Harry and says: "Harry — we've had word from the palace." 

Harry has to grab for the tumbler again, mutters, " _Christ_ ," and chases it down with the rest of the single malt, breathes around the fireball in his throat and the growing panic in his belly. There had been a number of discussions around his recruitment, true, but over the years they'd fallen away — the early promises to keep him limited to lower risk intelligence work, the asinine attempts to make opportunities for charitable projects. Harry had grown up out of the spotlight and never wanted for it, and it had seemed foolish, increasingly unnecessary, to cling to those absurd caveats of his service. He'd survived his tenure in the Royal Marines and come out of SAS training as any other young man who volunteered to be waterboarded in arctic conditions would. To maintain the illusion that some accident of birth and bloodline precluded him from the sacrifices and duties of his colleagues and peers was unconscionable — especially —  

"King George is dying," C says, with a softness that betrays how little he must know of Harry's dreadful childhood in drafty country estates, the absentminded tending from nannies, how he'd loathed his grandfather's bloody temper. 

"So I'll owe my condolences to the queen and my well-wishes to David and Clarissa," Harry grits out. 

"The Duke and Duchess of Hampton were killed, three weeks ago, in a motorway accident on the M25," C says. "You know they left no issue — and the Duke of York — "

" _Shit_ ," Harry snarls, and goes for the bottle again, his heart thrashing in his chest.  

" — has confirmed he will abdicate, when the time comes," C continues, relentless.  

Only excruciatingly good breeding keeps Harry from drinking directly from the cut crystal decanter. He has a sudden, vivid memory of being six, wearing short pants and a navy jumper at Bloody Cousin Bertie's party, feeling deeply grateful even at such a tender age that feudalism was past and that Bertram Hart, Earl of Wessex, had no estate that relied upon his good judgment. It was not an opinion that had shifted much in the subsequent three decades.  

"I'll abdicate, too," Harry says, staring down at the decanters. 

Underneath the Huntsman bespoke, the starched white shirt and braces, Harry's body is a history of his work where no other record must remain. There's the ugly exit wound scar from Colombia, a decade ago, which had gone untreated and then poorly treated, and which now is a knot of glossy white and mottled tissue low on his back. There's a long lash from a serrated short blade in Cambodia. There's the the shrapnel scarring — pieces of jagged tin can and scavenged metal garbage — from improvised explosive devices. All his life he'd been careful, no tattoos to mark him lest they give him away, but it hasn't mattered. Harry's a map of his experiences, writ large across the marked flesh and reset bones — all of it meaning so much more than where and to whom he was born. 

"And doom our country to endure Charles Mayweather as our head of state?" C scoffs.

"You can't possibly be serious with this line of inquiry," Harry argues. "In what way am I an acceptable monarch?"

"You are of sound mind and body," C begins, eminently and irritatingly reasonable. "You were top of your classes in university, in the Royal Marines and your service with the SAS was exemplary. During your tenure with MI6, your contributions to this nation and the world at large have been innumerable — what is a king if not a leader ready and able to ride out in England's defense?" 

Harry clutches the tumbler closer to his chest in defense. "The last English monarch to ride into battle was Richard III, C." 

"They located his remains, Harry, and his scoliosis wouldn't have been too noticeable in armor," C says, with a total lack of sympathy. 

Harry stares past C, to the massive wall of windows that comprised the majority of his office. Beyond the tempered, reinforced glass, London appeared in watercolor sketches, drenched by October rains and gray with mist. 

"All my life, the possibility had been raised in the abstract," Harry murmurs, to the city, to the green countryside beyond it, to the hills and crags and moors — to C. "But as much as I dreaded and resented it, I thought I was safe."

C stands from behind his desk, and when he takes the decanter from Harry's hands, it's kindly — and kindly too is how he refills Harry's tumbler. 

"I made promises, too, Harry," C says to him, and now his voice is low and tired. "And one of them was to surrender you to the crown should the occasion ever arrive."

Harry says, " _Fuck_ ," and empties his glass in a single swallow.

* * *

Getting fired from MI6 at Harry's level of seniority is usually deferred to the gentle handling of wetworks. So it's an odd thing to find himself traveling the so-familiar floors and levels for maybe the very last time. Very soon, his face will be very famous, and so many carefully cultivated inroads and lines of communication will die along with his life of well-loved anonymity. He's been debriefed — drunk — by C himself. He's been handed a medal for his years of unflagging service, and Harry finds himself thus: a 50 year old man standing in the wreckage of his office, an empty box he can't fill with personal effects as he has none. Everything in the overflowing space has a story and a secret attached. To take it would be tantamount to treason. 

He leaves with his medal, his umbrella, and he doesn't look at anyone, any of the junior agents that quietly line the halls in silent respect. He can't bear to look at them. How can he deliver them into someone else's handling? 

Merlin has escaped from Q branch to lurk in wait for him in the lift. Seeing no obvious means to kill himself effectively to evade the inevitable, Harry gets on with it. 

The doors are barely closed before Merlin snatches Harry's umbrella away and says, "Watch, first — then gun, phone, and however many terrifying daggers you have hidden around your person."

Harry surrenders the watch, carefully doesn't look at the well worn leather and think of how he's relied upon it this past decade, carefully kept it in working order, repaired it and changed the batteries, updated the field-issue neurotoxins stored in the buckle for emergencies. He gives up the gun dispassionately, and produces for Merlin a trio of knives, which he feels sufficient to throw Merlin off the scent of the fourth. He hands over the phone in the end, retrieves it from his trouser pocket, and Merlin exchanges it for a phone that looks entirely identical. 

"All your contacts have been ported in," Merlin informs him. 

Harry stares at him. 

"Excepting the classified information," Merlin goes on, rolling his eyes with exaggerated weariness. "I also included a few additional apps to help you transition to civilian life."

Biometric unlock reveals a home screen with all the iPhone standard applications, appended with Grindr and Tinder. 

"I see now why you took away my weapons first," Harry says mildly. 

"Q branch prides itself on foresight and innovation," Merlin replies, but he says it quietly. 

Harry met Merlin the first time almost two decades ago, both of them young men trying to find their places within the hierarchy of the organization. Harry was was still sun scorched from an SAS mission that had ended with a relative lack of disaster, and Merlin freshly acquired from the Glasgow Home Office. Harry has no idea when or how they became friends, but he suspects that the affection between them had developed depth along with Merlin's profanity and threats of violence whenever Harry returned from the field having lost or destroyed his equipment. 

It's bewildering to think that Merlin may never scream bloody murder at him again. 

The elevator is closing in on the ground floor, and once there, Harry will be escorted by military police to his car. He'll be searched — politely, but thoroughly — and he will be sent on his way. He has a 4 p.m. appointment at Kensington. A very posh and very young woman has called twice to secure his cooperation.  

"You should start with Grindr," Merlin advises. "More immediate gratification."

Harry closes his eyes so he doesn't see the numbers on the elevator display tick lower. "Fuck, _shit_ ," he says, the words escaping from behind his carefully gritted teeth, molars scraping together to entrap the scream coiled in his throat. 

"Here," Merlin says, and Harry opens his eyes to see Merlin offering — a watch.

The face is white, with a rose gold chronograph and alligator band. It's weighty when Harry takes it into his nerveless fingers, ticking quietly, continuously against his palm. 

"It's not Q branch quality, of course, but I've made some adjustments to keep my hand in," Merlin says, too casually.  

"Thank you, Merlin," Harry says, with a gravity that feels at once out of place between them and wholly necessary in these circumstances. 

The elevator doors open and as predicted, he's searched by the MPs with commendable thoroughness and professionalism. They say, "We're bloody sorry to hear it, Mr. Hart," and they wish him well, watch him get into his car and behind the wheel, wave like lost children as Harry begins to drive away. 

* * *

Harry has every intention of driving straight to his home — his _private_ house — appearing for his 4 p.m. summons, and handling this matter in the measured, adult way in which he'd lived the majority of his life. 

Somehow, he fails to do any of that. He drives for hours, circling London so many times he passes the same cabbie ferrying Canary Wharfers home three times, at which point the poor man makes the universal, "You going mad, mate?" hand motion through the windscreen and Harry's forced to unearth his courteous, perfectly sane smile. The driver's expression telegraphs that it is less than convincing. At five past 4 p.m., the posh young woman from the palace starts calling him at 3 minute intervals, and Harry thinks it's a shame she's selected a career among the royal family when her true calling was clearly torture and interrogation. He turns it off at half-five, considers hurling the phone into a canal, reconsiders at the probable rare earth metal poisoning he'd be inflicting on the local population of flora and fauna. When Harry goes to shut it up in his glovebox, he finds an ancient tube of slick from before Jim left him and a bottle of awful gin from when Jim had been been leaving him, cleaning his things out of the house, and Harry had sat in the car drinking like a coward until he'd finished. Fitting, Harry thinks. He ends up well south of the river, parked in some desolate patch of London poorly lit by flickering street lights and almost zero foot traffic.  

At this point, drinking seems like the only possible course of action.

* * *

* * *

Dean's having a properly rank night. 

Eggsy'd come home from, you know, wherever, and found him sat on the tatty sofa angrily smoking his way through a pack of Pall Mall Super Kings and clawing at a bottle of malt liquor watching _Top Gear_ on the telly. Fuck.

He'd done a quick look through the flat, yeah, and no Daisy and no Mum, which was a relief, and he'd managed to get back out the door mostly without incident. Dean might threaten to throw bottles but it was still half full — he might be a fucking drunk but he wasn't a wasteful one. 

Jamal was at some shite work placement stroke indentured servitude, and Malcolm was in Newcastle with some other group of mates for a stag do so they were right out. That left Eggsy pacing through Burgess Park as it got colder and fucking wetter, hands shoved into the pockets of his jacket as he haunted the length of the football pitch and wondered if he should go down round the pub. On the one hand, Dean's thugs were just as likely as anybody to be there. On the other hand, the barman at the Black Prince was still soundly fucked off with Eggsy over the Incident.  

Safer to sleep rough among the sport buildings, really, Eggsy had decided, and so that's how he'd ended up here: staring at — a fucking _Bentley_ parked at an off angle in the dead end of Loncroft Road. 

This area, this late at night, there's no fucking reason for it to be here at all, and Eggsy feels weirdly, stupidly shy to be standing here, staring at this fucking car. It's beautiful, a deep, dark-colored Bentley with a gleaming silver grill and coy, 1950s curves. Eggsy's only ever seen cars like this on television, driven by twats, and he looks at it curled sleeping like a cat in the dim lamplight and just wants to put his hands on it.

The windows are all some kind of tinted, silvery-gray and beautiful, so Eggsy thinks he might be able to see inside closer, or at an angle, or summat. Either way, he looks left and right and sidles up close so he can admire the sleek curve of the car's body, the little wings round the B on the boot. The front windscreen is tinted the same, so the inside's a mystery. Butterscotch leather or darker, Eggsy wonders. Are there bucket seats? Eggsy paces the car whistling a little to himself, trailing his fingers down lines of her until he catches the driver's side handle and tugs, just for fun.

And it falls open — soft — at Eggsy's hand.

Eggsy whispers, " _Shit_ ," to himself, but it's a sign from the universe, clear as day, and he thinks he'll just peek in. He'll just have a look. 

Inside the little minx of a vehicle is equally stunning: soft leather bucket seats and a beautiful walnut dash, all those old-timey gauges and readers set inside of it — polished to gleaming. Eggsy runs his fingers over the the circular face of the speedometer, carefully touches the tabs of the radio, and he can feel his smile getting bigger, stretching out across his face. He'll just sit down, just for a minute, no harm done, and this way if someone comes and tries to lift the car they'll bugger off to see him in it, he tells himself while sliding inside.

Jesus, the leather's like _butter_ , and Eggsy groans as he sinks down into the driver's seat, curls his hand around the steering wheel to feel the lovely solidness of it, the rivets on it. When he draws the door closed — _carefully_ — the inside of the car is perfectly, gorgeously silent, and Eggsy examines all the buttons and switches and dials and wonders what they do and how they operate and —

His hand brushes over something soft, rolled up between the seats. When Eggsy reaches for it, he comes up with a rolled-tight tie: navy with red and white stripes: weighty and silk in his hands, and Eggsy wonders who owns this car and where they are. Why they've left this beauty here untended. What they might look like, wearing the tie.

"Glovebox," he whispers to himself, afraid a little to break the quiet. It takes some aggressive groping around the dash, which is no problem at all, but when he tugs on the metal handle all he finds inside are registration papers and an iPhone, powered down, some unmarked plastic bottle.

Eggsy stares at the tie and the phone, at the gorgeous car and the shitty estate over the park and down the road and wonders and wonders. 

"I'll consider it fair comeuppance if you decide to steal the car," comes suddenly from the backseat. "But would you mind terribly helping me out of this car before you take off with it?"

Eggsy would _like_ to look back on this later and say that he took stock of the situation, recalled his brief training with the marines, and returned something appropriately tarty. 

Actually what he does is scream bloody murder in a pitch he hasn't reached since his testicles descended, hurl himself out of the car, and end up tumbling half to his knees on the rain-slick pavement, staring back into the darkened abyss of the Bentley's interior.

Once Eggsy manages to get his heart back inside of his fucking rib cage, he clasps at his overwrought chest and hunches over his knees, gasping and trying not to wonder if the car is _haunted_ because it's too stupid even for the privacy of his own mind.  

"Shit," he says to himself. "Jesus. _Shit_."

"I do apologize," the car says to him. "I've had — a rather emotional day."

Eggsy feels fucking _faint_. " _Fuck me_ ," he whispers, and louder he calls out, "W-Where are you?" because "Are you a ghost?" is too embarrassing.

"Backseat," the car answers, and Eggsy watches the back wheels rock a little, someone moving around in there, before the voice adds, "And please do come back inside — it's beginning to rain quite hard."

It is, one of those nasty autumn downpours that comes on the tail of a day-long drizzle, and it's starting to soak through the collar of Eggsy's jacket and through his hat and sooner or later it'll soak through his trainers but _Jesus H_. He takes two steps closer and stops again, and at the hesitation the Bentley calls out:  

"If you get much wetter I'd be loathe to have you get inside and ruin my seats."

And then, Eggsy's eyes must finally adjust to the dark, because he sees in the darkness of the car's interior a hand clasping at the passenger seat headrest: long fingers, trim nails, a signet ring on the pinky finger — as human as anything. It's both reassuring and kind of a let down because while he's glad not to be dealing with a fucking haunted car, he's a bit disappointed he's not dealing with Knight Rider, either. 

"Yeah, all right," Eggsy mumbles, and clambers in, keeping his body at a careful angle so he can see who's been sacked out in the backseat. "Who are you, anyway?" 

The man in the backseat, when Eggsy finally sees him, is exactly the sort who owns cars like this — if not the kind that parks them hereabouts in Southwark. He's middle-aged, beginning to go a bit gray at the temples, wearing an expensive suit that's creased to hell, tie loose at his throat. Eggsy swallows — hard. Also, he's _gorgeous,_ soft eyed, with a curl loose from his otherwise neat hair, and he looks so posh and so slightly, attractively disheveled that Eggsy instinctively, reflexively blushes. Shit.

"Harry Hart," the man says, and motions at the still-open car door. "How do you do."

_How do you do_ , Eggsy marvels, and drags the door closed. In the new quiet of the car cabin, he says, "Uh — Eggsy. I mean, Gary. Unwin. How do you do. Too."

He seriously considers getting out of the car again, walking into Burgess Park and drowning himself in the pond. 

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Eggsy," Harry tells him, and he says it like he's sincere, offering a hand. Now that the rain and wind aren't billowing, Eggsy can smell the booze on him, but Harry Hart doesn't look like Dean, deep in his bottle, he looks mild and soft-edged and flushed — what's that word? Harry Hart looks _languid_ , and it just makes Eggsy's blush go darker.  

"Right, nice to meet you, too, Harry," Eggsy says. It's an awkward handshake — weird angle — but it's a nice hand: cool and strong and Harry sweeps his thumb down the back of Eggsy's hand in a way that makes him _shiver_.

When Harry lets go, Eggsy's sorry for it. 

"So," Harry says, casual as you like and settling comfortably into the backseat, so that Eggsy has to look at the long stretch of him folded up — imagine what must be long legs and broad shoulders, eating up the space. "What brings you around at such a late hour?" 

Eggsy boggles. "What _brings me around_ — are you _taking the piss,_ mate?"

Harry just arches an eyebrow, raises his other hand — clutched tightly around a bottle of Beefeaters — and says, "No, I hadn't intended to."

"Better question is, why are _you_ here?" Eggsy retorts. "This ain't exactly your neighborhood, bruv."

Harry's sigh is philosophical, long suffering, nihilistic. His head rolls back along the bench seat and Eggsy stares and stares at Harry's Adam's Apple and _does not think_ about how it might feel under his mouth, to suck at his neck. 

"It's been awful, Eggsy," Harry confides. "They won't stop calling me."

Unbelievable, Eggsy thinks. "Just go home and grovel, mate. It ain't worth it."

"I beg your pardon," Harry says, sounding torn between confused and offended. 

Eggsy reaches over and grabs the phone he'd seen earlier, holds it out. "Here."

Harry scowls, and when he takes the phone, all he does is hurl it into the footwell of the car, where Eggsy can hear it thump to a stop. 

"Oh, that's nice," Eggsy says. He thinks about his mum, the way she gets red-eyed when she can't get hold of him, how Daisy screams and screams and how she clutches at him the way no baby should, scared she'd never see him again. It churns into a rock in his throat, the way he's picking between going home to Dean's fucking fists or leaving his mum and sister to them all the time every time. "Don't be like that — they're probably worried about your stupid arse."

Harry barks out a noise that might be a laugh if it wasn't so angry. Or drunk. "They are," he allows. "Not because they care about me."

He lifts his head, and stares at Eggsy — too focused for the rat-arsed toff he is. 

"And you?" he asks, suddenly precise. 

Eggsy stares at him. "Me?"  

Harry smiles, just a little thing around the corners of his mouth. He says, "Yes, Eggsy — why are you here?" 

"Maybe I was lookin' to boost your ride, yeah?" Eggsy tells him, mostly because he thinks it'll make Harry laugh — and when Harry _does_ , it zings through Eggsy like champagne bubbles, makes him smile back, automatic and fucking embarrassing. "Um, I live round here, actually. The estate over the road." 

Harry doesn't say anything like _oh_ , or _of course you do_. He raises an eyebrow and says, "And you're out here in the rain instead of over the road in your cozy flat because?" 

Eggsy looks at his hands first, where they're fisted in his lap, shrugs, because he feels fucking embarrassed just thinking about it. And the shadows in the car and the noise of the rain make the inside of the Bentley feel secret, different, a nook in the world where Eggsy's not who he is and Jesus, he'd rather talk about Harry. 

"S'not interesting," Eggsy says finally. "Not like you. Not like this car, yeah." 

And Harry's whole answer is to stare at him, with a soft look on his face and in his eyes — amber colored from the orange of the street lamps. Eggsy thinks that if he knew Harry better, if he could read the way his mouth is slanted, the way his shoulders are set, how Harry's hand is clutching at the back of one of the front seats, he'd be able to read everything Harry's not saying out loud. Maybe that's a good thing, even, because Eggsy thinks that he's only known Harry five minutes, and he's made Harry laugh and he'd rather that's what Harry remembers of him later — tomorrow — if he remembers anything at all. 

"Eggsy," Harry says finally, after a million years have gone by, "do you know how to drive?"

* * *

Dean didn't start out bad. 

The first time Eggsy's mum had brought him round, Dean had come with a little toy car, and he'd let his cigarette go to ash, hanging out the corner of his mouth as he and Eggsy'd raced around the track of the sitting room rug. Dean always had swank cars, was forever getting them clamped and swearing high heaven about it, and for Eggsy's 12th birthday Dean'd said, "It's our secret, eh?" and put Eggsy in the driver's seat, let him drive it stop — start — stop — start round the estate while his mum had been at work. 

And after everything, after the drink and the first bruise his mum had tried to hide and the first time Dean'd shoved him into a wall, threatened to put a fag out on Eggsy's hand — after all of it, Eggsy still _fucking loves cars_.  

The Bentley's a fucking revelation. It idles like a purring cat under Eggsy's hands — he can feel the six cylinder rumbling through the body of the car — and when he shifts gears the whole car moves with him. It tilts into every turn and Eggsy feels like he's part of the car, that his hands and feet and his body extend into the leather and steel, that the roads of London are under the soles of his shoes.  

"Christ, this is fucking _gorgeous_ ," Eggsy moans, and Harry — sprawled out and smiling in the passenger seat — just says:

"I had work done, some years ago, on the car: its top speed is 125 miles per hour."

Eggsy whips round to stare at him, at the way Harry's grinning at him and the backdrop of London after midnight's blurring round them in the windows of the Bentley. He looks longer than he should, given that he's driving at a very reasonable _30_ miles per hour, but Eggsy can't help it. He says, "You're havin' a laugh."

Harry just tips his chin toward the front windscreen. "We're headed toward Bishopsgate and I know for a fact they're changing shifts now — no time like the present to defy the City of London police on a major thoroughfare."

"Shit," Eggsy says, and he knows he sounds wild and too excited. "No shit?"

Harry's grin goes wider, stretches out into a _smile,_ blissful, and he leans back against the headrest. 

"Eggsy," he says — and it comes out like the engine, it comes out like a purr — " _drive_."

The rain's stopped, and Harry's rolled down the windows so the wind's billowing into the Bentley and sending his carefully done-up hair wild with brown curls. Eggsy's face is hot from the rush and cold from the wind, and he lets out a bloody _scream_ of joy as he breaks 90 going past Monument — steaming down the deserted streets and over London Bridge, over the fucking river. 

Eggsy goes down the back alleys and small streets, the narrow passes. He must drive through 100 different amber lights, and the first time he stops at a red, Harry fucking _smirks_ and puts his hand over Eggsy's on the stick to shift it back into gear. 

"You're fucking _mental!_ " Eggsy tells him, shouts it over the wind, over the roar.  

But he can hear the way he's laughing that he's _gone_ on it. He's fucking _shattered_ by the way Harry's laughing back at him, by the wrinkles around Harry's eyes and the glint of road lights off of his heavy rimmed glasses. By his mouth and his hair and the way he's loosened his tie and undone the top button of his collar — so Eggsy can see his throat and how he swallows, how his breath catches. They must look crazy, they're going to be arrested if they don't get themselves killed tonight, and Eggsy thinks this is the most fucking _gone_ on a person he's ever been. 

They end up parked on the dead end T of Cringle Street, in the shadow of Battersea Power Station. The view over the river is just the nondescript orange-white blitz of lights, and Eggsy ends up sat on the hood of the Bentley — shivering from the cold, off his head from the driving — watching Harry light a cigarette, staring at the profile of his lovely face and feeling an ache starting to grow in his gut. 

"You must be running from some mess, bruv," Eggsy says. He doesn't exactly whisper it, but it feels like a whisper. It feels secret, for Harry and no one else. 

Harry lets out of a plume of smoke, the orange tip of the cigarette going ashen, and he makes a noise that's not a yes or a no. 

"Putting off the inevitable, I suppose," Harry murmurs, and he glances back over his shoulder, back to Eggsy, that wry smile back. "Thank you, Eggsy." 

Eggsy looks down at his kicks, where's scuffing them in the dirt, that shyness back, overwhelming. He's not felt like this in ages, since he wasn't old enough to know better, and Harry's smile and his long legs and his fucking cigarette are like a fist to the stomach, knock all the air out of Eggsy. 

"I should be thanking you, for lettin' me drive that beauty round like a maniac," he says in the end, because it wouldn't do to say, _can I kiss you? I've always wanted to kiss someone like you_.

"Nevertheless," Harry says, and really, it's ridiculous how gorgeous he is, standing limned in the building lights, north of the river. 

Eggsy doesn't know that he has a type. Maybe his type is posh blokes who look — standing here, right now — as lost as Eggsy feels all the time. Eggsy looks at Harry's fingers on the slim body of the cigarette, looks at his long legs and the tired slump of his shoulders. Eggsy wants to go over to him, stretch out his arms and sort out Harry's curls, to comb them back into order. Eggsy wants to touch Harry's jaw and be allowed, to feel always like this: breathless and unmoored, skin buzzing from driving a Bentley at 100 miles per hour through London's enclosing darkness — the entire night a vast, sprawling secret, something cupped close between two hands. 

Eggsy bets Harry — tonight aside — knows exactly what he's doing. He's bulletproof, Eggsy bets. Every day, when Harry's not drunk in South London and handing over the keys of his car to strangers, Harry's probably untouchable. 

Tonight though, tonight, Eggsy wants to chivvie Harry back into the car, to drive him far away somewhere safe. Just cos Harry doesn't need protecting doesn't mean Eggsy doesn't want to do it anyway, to shield him — deflect whatever drove him out here tonight. 

He can't really, though. He can't do any of that. All Eggsy can do is ask:

"So what's next then, bruv?"

Harry presses his fingers to his mouth, a physical comma on the conversation. 

"I suppose tomorrow morning, I shall have to go and grovel, as you suggested," Harry says, after a long beat. "For tonight though — my life is still my own." 

Eggsy hears his own smile more than he feels it, going wide on his mouth. "Yeah?" 

Harry makes a humming noise in his throat and looks down at his watch, a weighty, gorgeous thing on his wrist. "Six hours remaining it looks like," he says mildly. 

London's exhausting sometimes, but it's not New York. It's not open 24/7, the lights of Time Square blazing. After midnight, once the Tube goes dark, so do entire neighborhoods: the City falling quiet, Hampstead's last restaurants turning off their lights. Eggsy thinks that he could ask if Harry wants to hit up the bars and dancing in Hoxton. He could ask if Harry'd like to go get a pint in SoHo, stand around on corners clutching their glasses and smoking pack after pack of cigarettes — anything to extend the hours, make the night stretch long past morning.

"Got anything you want to do with your last night of freedom?" Eggsy asks.

"Do you know, I have no idea," Harry laughs, like he's never thought about it, like his days are so full and every hour so occupied he's barely considered it, the possibility of it, of whatever he wants to do. That's so fucking strange — it's all Eggsy can bear to think about: where he'd rather be, what he'd rather be doing, where he'd go that's anywhere but here, fucking stuck with Dean, run away with Daisy and his mum. 

"You got six hours, mate," Eggsy pushes. "You got a willing driver — we could go anywhere. Just pick your poison, yeah?"

Harry looks thoughtful and puts out his cigarette, turning on his heel to sidle up to the car again, settle down on the bonnet next to Eggsy. Maybe he says things, but for a minute Eggsy only hears the noise of Harry's suit swishing against his track jacket, the heat and solidness of Harry's thigh pressed up against his own. 

"In the last six months, I've been to a dozen countries," Harry tells him. "When I landed back in London, two days ago, the only thing in my house was a tin of beans that were three months past the expiry date — "

Eggsy bursts out laughing, he can't help it.  

" — and I had unopened mail from July on the table in the front hall," Harry continues, smiling. "I don't know that _going_ somewhere is what I need to do, truthfully."

Eggsy can't help it, Harry looks so dear like this. He leans over, bumps his shoulder into Harry's, says, "All right, then — we could just stay right here then, live off of Tesco Finest Sandwiches and Magners and never grow old."

Harry bumps him back, and Eggsy doesn't bother to hide how it makes him _delighted_.

"It's far too late for me to avoid growing old," Harry scolds, but his mouth is twitching as he does it. His face is red, too, from the bluster of the autumn wind and maybe the last of the alcohol.

"You ain't old," Eggsy tells him, automatic. "Not to me." 

"And how old are you?" Harry asks. "Eighteen? Twenty?"  

Harry's too close, his voice too near for Eggsy to be offended, for Eggsy to feel anything other than lightheaded, hot all over for breathing in Harry's cologne.  

"I'm twenty-four," Eggsy says. "I ain't no kid anymore." 

"No," Harry murmurs, and Eggsy gasps when he feels Harry's hand — heavy, fingertips cold — close over the back of his neck, thumb brushing through the short hairs. "But you are _terribly_ young, Eggsy."

Eggsy has to suck in a breath, he's so dizzy, and a noise escapes his throat in the process: soft and high and begging. It's fucking terrible, it's _so_ fucking terrible, and Eggsy can feel how red his face must be, how red his throat must be, how red the skin must be under Harry's palm, his long fingers, the rough pads of his fingers. 

"I'm old enough," he croaks, and Eggsy reaches out — fucking terrified to touch and terrified not to, too — and clutches at Harry's shirt, through his open jacket, pressing his thumb into one of the buttons. "If you want?"

The hand on Eggsy's neck tightens, warning, and Eggsy gasps. The fist in Harry's shirt goes tighter, and Eggsy wants to drag Harry closer, to feel the weight of him, how Harry might lay him out on the bonnet of this gorgeous fucking car. Harry's face is mostly in shadow, but his eyes are gleaming and dark and _dangerous_ , all sharp edges. Eggsy thinks he should be scared right now, that there's something in the angles and shapes of Harry's face, the line of his nose and the wrinkles around his eyes, that should make Eggsy back the fuck off, get some air between them. But Eggsy feels like he's falling from a great height, buffeted by screaming wind and his heart racing, and he's never felt more alive than right now — right here.

Harry's voice comes out like a scrape against Eggsy's spine, sends shivers running down his arms and legs. He says, "I think you like the car, Eggsy."

"I like you, too," Eggsy tells him, feeling silly — _hopeful_.

Harry smiles at that, small and secret and just for Eggsy, and he murmurs, "You are very sweet, you know," leaning in close enough that Eggsy's heart nearly bursts from the fluttering fucking hope of it, before Harry tilts away — just enough — and presses their foreheads together, till the tips of their noses touch. It's less than nothing and still enough that Eggsy lets out a shaky breath at the feel of Harry's skin on his.  

"Jesus, is that a fucking no?" Eggsy asks, trembly. He's glad he's sitting.

"That's, 'you're very sweet,' Eggsy," Harry answers, and now he pulls away enough so that he can — aw, fuckin' hell _—_ press a kiss to the corner of Eggsy's eye, lingering. Eggsy's well past imaginary dignity now, so he lets himself lean into it, to clutch a little more desperately at Harry's shirt, make sure he puts some wrinkles into it, so that in six hours, when Harry goes back to his real life, that Eggsy will have left some mark on him, that some little piece of him will remain. 

"Sounds like 'no' to me," Eggsy mumbles, but it comes out soft, no fight in it, because Harry's stroking his hand down Eggsy's back now, soothing, and he can't be angry like this — not if Harry will let Eggsy press his forehead into the curve of his neck, into his wrinkled, wilted collar. 

Harry's chuckle, felt through the solid mass of his chest, is even better than just listening to it, Eggsy thinks furiously. What the _fuck_. 

"Come on then," Harry says softly, "time to go back, I think." 

* * *

* * *

The drive back is awkward, terrible and crushingly silent. 

Eggsy just takes Harry's keys away from him, mumbling something about him being too drunk, still, to drive, and climbs behind the wheel. But all the joy's stripped out of him: he doesn't take the turns too quickly or blow through red lights; he yields every time it's requested of him. Harry doesn't remember what route Eggsy takes or indeed the streets around them, whether the earliest shift of London's workers are starting to dot the pavements.  

He just slumps there in the passenger side feeling old and angry with himself — for taking liberties, for not taking enough liberties, for not letting his mouth trail from the lovely rise of Eggsy's cheek to the lush pout of his mouth, earlier that night. Eggy would have opened up for him as sweetly as he seemed to do everything else, Harry imagines. Eggsy would have clutched at Harry's shirt, made those lovely, desperate noises, and Harry could have chased that gorgeous pink flush down the line of his throat, followed it down Eggsy's chest, scraped his tongue down the boy's sternum. 

But Eggsy had asked, _if you want?_ without any guile, without knowing what a rare and marvelous treasure he was, and Harry had felt — suddenly, sharply — his own age and predatory instincts. If Eggsy hadn't been so lovely. If he hadn't been so sweet. _If_.

Harry slants his gaze to Eggsy's profile, the sweet line of his nose and pout of his lip. 

Eggsy must be furious — and understandably so — to be thought of as so young. From his vantage point, twenty-four being the oldest he's ever been, it must be massive, to be nearly a quarter of a century on the planet, to have been a child and an adolescent and to have grown into his beautiful long limbs and lovely face. 

Harry is twice his age and weary, feeling the world beginning to close dramatically in on him. Harry's been a child and an adolescent and when he was twenty-four, he held a man for his dying breaths the first time. Six months later, the kick of his weapon had left a bruise on him, and Harry had looked and looked at it and wondered if it wasn't a cosmic reminder he'd killed someone that day — that he'd extinguished the life of someone's brother or husband or son. He'd grown older and more quiet, started finding gray hairs and wrinkles, and he'd covered it all up with the flawless affectations of his excruciating German (in)breeding and bespoke suits and a position in the intelligence community that had him out of the country more than he was ever in it. Harry never minded living with his choices, so long as whomever wielded him as weapon pointed him in the right direction. 

If everything wasn't as it is, then he might have given in — might have tipped Eggsy's face up and kissed him, sealed their lips together pressed into his mouth, possessing. Harry would have loved to kiss him and kiss him, until the boy was hot and breathless, tearing away with a gasp and a pleas for air, and it would have been perfect, then, to sink his teeth into Eggsy's gorgeous throat and leave a mark there. Harry could have stolen him away, like so many state secrets, tumbled him into bed and kept him there, tied a wrist to his bed frame with a silk tie and worked him over, opened him up. Harry collects butterflies and beautiful things, and how marvelous it would have been, to keep Eggsy, to kiss him lushly, dizzyingly into silence, to leave him bruised and sweet and languid — to make him toast and tea lace their fingers together. 

_But everything is just as it is_ , Harry thinks, and blinks, looks away, realizes there's rain streaking the windows now. 

"So where to, bruv?" Eggsy asks him, eyes fixed straight ahead. He sounds so terribly flat and level it must be killing him to maintain it. 

_Come home with me, let me keep you_ , Harry doesn't say.

"The park is fine," is what he does say, in the end.

Eggsy scowls, but doesn't glance away from the windscreen. "You ain't sleepin' in the park tonight — not even in this car, mate." 

"I'll drive home once you've been safely returned home," Harry says, and he's aware how priggish and ridiculous he sounds, what a transparent bid it is to extend his time with Eggsy this is. But as discussed extensively, it's his last night of freedom; if he desires to use it being pathetic and embarrassing himself, he will.  

_Now_ Eggsy's disapproval is severe enough he deigns to frown _at_ Harry, which is also embarrassingly delightful. 

" _You_ are still _lashed_ ," Eggsy tells him with the certainty of a boy who's never been trained by Her Majesty's finest in how to operate a vehicle while under the influence of high levels of narcotics.

"I'm quite sober now," Harry protests because he is, truly. 

Eggsy rolls his eyes, but he sets the indicator, and when he says, "When you get done for drink driving don't come complaining at me for bail, then." 

Harry should be gracious and polite, keep a discretionary distance here. He should let this more comfortable silence flourish until he's seen to it that Eggsy's returned safely back to his flat, and then he ought to go home and sort himself out. He should prepare an apology for tomorrow and throw out the Bentley's stock of lubricants and hard liquor, both of which are clearly enticements to foolish fucking decision making. 

Instead, Harry teases, "You'd let me languish in jail, then?"

Eggsy's mouth twitches, almost a smile. "Shut up with you," he says, but it comes out as playful as Harry feels. 

"Cruel," Harry says. "And after I encouraged all of your joyriding tonight."

"Yeah, well," Eggsy replies, more quietly now, a bit sadder around the eyes. "This whole night's been an aberration, hasn't it."

There's nothing to say to that, Harry knows, but he wishes he could articulate the conflict in his throat — the argument he's holding close, tucked underneath his tie. But neither can Eggsy end this evening and vanish thinking he's been sent away unwanted; the thought's unconscionable. Harry can hardly provide a candid overview of how his desire must be secondary to his duty, not to a boy who has navigated the streets of London and handled Harry's car with such unselfconscious happiness — let it spill over and suffuse Harry's weary resignation, if only for an evening. 

The trip back — without the tangents and delirious joy of earlier — is short without the daytime traffic of London, and too soon they're back in Southwark, in the shadow of Aylesbury Estate. 

"Park?" Eggsy asks.

"Block of flats," Harry rejoins. "What if it starts raining again?"

Eggsy huffs. "Then I'll get a damp collar, yeah?" he says, impatient, tapping out some kind of nervous beat on the steering wheel. "Still think I'd best drive you home."

He says it, but lets the car come to a stop, shifts gears. Harry listens to the engine idle, watches how Eggsy's fisting his hands in his lap, and still he doesn't know what to say — finds all the diplomatic consolations unsuitable for this moment.

_Fuck it_ , Harry thinks, and like the rest of this night, does exactly what he wants and not what he should.

He reaches over, collects Eggsy's right hand into his own and drawing it near, so that Harry can press a kiss into the palm — drag his lips to the pulse in Eggsy's wrist, lingering. 

Eggsy gasps, he whispers, " _Shit_ ," and Harry smiles at that, into the boy's skin. He curls Eggsy's fingers closed now, into a loose fist, so that he can mouth a kiss along the knuckles, murmur: 

"You deserve better than what I would be able to offer, Eggsy." 

Eggsy doesn't say anything for a long time. He touches Harry's face instead, with his free hand and uncertain, but then he's hooked his fingers into the silk of Harry's tie, clutching at him in a way that's both terribly sweet and terribly provoking.

"Ain't that my call?" Eggsy asks, his voice unsteady. "Don't I get a say?"

It's a mistake, an awful error in judgment, but he looks up at the way Eggsy's voice is aching only to find his expression worse. Eggsy's eyes are too green and too bright, and the way he's biting at the plush softness of his lower lip telegraphs the anticipation of being disappointed — of knowing mostly "no" in his life. Harry looks at the gorgeous flush of Eggsy's cheeks, the wrinkle of his brow, and wants to kiss that expression off of Eggsy's face, to spoil him in perpetuity, give him everything he wants.

"Harry," Eggsy whispers, leaning closer in little fits and starts, " _please_."

That's when the driver's side door to the Bentley's jerked open, and Eggsy dragged out of it by the back of his hair, by the collar, by rough and searching hands.


	2. Chapter 2

Harry remembers being a much younger man, being trained to react with his body and reflect on his actions later, to be certain in leadership and orders and to survive above all. Harry remembers being older, getting smarter and sharper, how in a firefight he knows how his blood will roar and his adrenaline will soar and how to stay clear eyed through all of it, to be not an indiscriminate weapon, but a calculated, fatal strike.

He's barely heard the sound of knuckles on flesh before he's out of the car.

Eggsy's on his knees, his snapback on the ground by his hand. It's too dark for details, but Harry sees a barrel-jawed thug with his fingers knotted up in Eggsy's hair, and watches him spit out, "Should have fuckin' known what you was up to," and —

The point is, it's been a long time since Harry's dealt out violence in reflex. Upper level intelligence work these days is less-polite diplomacy; the wetworks, the projects, they're handled by special operations. But the marrow of Harry's bones know violence and he's intercepted the fist before it can — _Christ_ — make contact with Eggsy's bruised, bloodied mouth again, his teeth pink in his mouth and his eyes glazed already in pain.

"Who _the fuck_ are you, mate?" someone shouts, and Harry blinks and takes stock — finally — of the situation.

Six men, ranging from early 20s to early 30s and heights from 5'7" to 6", the one with the fist in Harry's hand — he _squeezes_ , so he can feel the bones grind, watch the man's face go slowly ashen from it — the heaviest of the lot, 18, 19 stone. They all have the broken-nosed looks of brawlers, rough boys with sharp tongues and awful barks and no training at all; it would be the furthest thing from a fair fight. Harry ought to collect Eggsy and walk away, patch him up for the evening and see him home and — 

"If you're lookin' for another rent boy," one in the back sneers, "they're up by Smith Street."

Harry hears Eggsy hiss out, "Fuck, Harry, get out of here, I'm fine, it's okay," but he's not listening, exactly. He's making the quiet calculations he'll need to affect nonlethal force. 

"Manners maketh man," he tells the bruiser directly in front of him, the man whose knuckles he's slowly gripping into paste, whose face is a rictus of pain and trying to hide it. "Do you know what that means?"  

Another mutters, "Come on, the _fuck_ are you doing?" and the tall one in the back calls out, "Fuckin' jog on, yeah?" and Harry allows himself one savage, perfect moment to grin before he says:

"Then let me teach you a lesson."

Harry _twists_ , the way he'd like to twist this cretin's neck off his body, and he hears with satisfaction the howl of agony and feels the splinter of bone inside skin and flesh. Complex fracture, excruciating. The other five in his audience stare dumbly, mute, frozen in an array in the shadow of the council estate, and Eggsy still on his knees, his mouth still bleeding, his face purpling, his eyes widening with wonder. 

Now, now is when he should help poor Eggsy off the soaked pavement, check him over and see him home. Now is when he should end it, drive back to his house and drink until dawn breaks pink and gray over the city and he surrenders himself to the crown, his fucking bloodline, the huge nothingness of his future, his life's work obliterated and his private life rent asunder. 

He says, "Are we going to stand round here all night — or are we going to fight?"  

They fight, but only just. The man on the ground with his broken wrist is immediately out of of the picture — too busy writhing and crying — and the other five who come at him together do so with slow fists and badly placed feet. It's too easy to trip one into the other, duck a wild swing so that a punch lands far away, in someone else's face, and Harry breaks one of their noses with a glorious _crunch_ from the heel of his hand to the ruddy face of one of the men, in a maroon track jacket with shorn-short hair.  

Harry gets one of them in the throat with a sharp jab, enough to knock him back, and resists the urge to kick him in the face when he tumbles to his knees. The other one he's less gentle with, puts a heel in his gut that has him breathless and stumbling, and out of sheer irritation with the final two he slams their heads together, hearing the sharp noise of bone meeting bone and then the heavy noise of bodies hitting the ground. 

No one's unconscious, exactly, but they're winded, and in enough pain that it's easy for Harry to turn to Eggsy — to offer him a hand and ask, "Are you all right?"

"What the _fuck_ ," Eggsy says, but he puts his palm in Harry's, his fingers wet and dirty and bleeding from where he'd broken his fall. 

"Terribly sorry," Harry teases, and when he has both Eggsy's hands in his, he pulls, until the boy comes tumbling toward him on shaky, colt's legs, his face flushed even in the dim light. And how awful, to find him so gorgeous like this, with a bruise on his cheek and dark blood at the bow of his lovely mouth, and it takes all of Harry's considerable will to only press a thumb against the corner of Eggsy's lips — not to sweep in and lick at the wound, possessing. "Had to let off a little steam." 

Eggsy blinks at him, eyes gleaming and round. "You almost killed 'em, Harry."

Harry doesn't say, _not at all, darling boy._ He says, "Well, they did hurt you."

"Shit," Eggsy says, voice trembling. " _Shit_."

Eggsy's eyes keep darting back to the detritus scattered hither and yon round their feet, and it keeps him distracted enough that Harry can tilt the boy's chin up with a curled index finger, frown at the already-deepening marks. And closer now, closer than they've been all night, Harry can see other bruises underneath, too: the accumulation of knuckles on the high curve of a cheek, a scar on Eggsy's mouth long healed up, a scrape on his jawline, just closed over. There's dirt on him and his snapback's a loss; even the wretched winged trainers of his are marked up — it all accrues to a picture that makes Harry feel a sudden, deep anger, that makes him close his hand over the back of Eggsy's neck. 

"Forgive me if I'm overstepping," Harry says, quiet, private, just between the two of them. Eggsy looks up at him again, finally, eyes green like sea glass, and Harry can't help but to touch his mouth again, cup his cheek. "If I send you home — will you be safe?"

Because Eggsy doesn't have the look of startled, shaken surprise Harry would expect. He looks resigned by all this — astonished by Harry. It makes Harry wonder what's waiting for Eggsy in his flat, whether Harry's made things worse by saving him this time, and if that's promised Eggsy a dozen more and worse beatings going forward.

Eggsy ignores the question in favor of closing his hand — it's bleeding, the heel of his palm scraped raw — around Harry's wrist, squeezing. "What are you, some kind of fucking ninja or something?"

"You knew those men," Harry says, because _or something_ would make Eggsy frown.

He doesn't answer at all, just looks away again, and now he draws himself away, too. Eggsy takes a step back on the wet pavement, reaches down to gather up his hat, sighs at it, rubs it into the damp cloth of his tracksuit jacket, and Harry thinks that his window for foolish, selfish decisions is long enough, still, for this. 

Harry reaches out, like a boy, like a younger version of himself, and snags Eggsy's hand with his own.  

"Come with me," Harry says to him. 

The boy's face is a picture, incandescent with hope, and Harry thinks he's never felt as he does in this moment: the rain starting to cascade downward, damping down Eggsy's dark blond hair, everything washed pale orange in the sodium lamplight.

"You sure?" Eggsy asks, and he looks around them, pointed, to where one of his assailants is trying to get up again, struggling to his feet.

Harry feels his smile, raw and reckless on top of everything else tonight.

"Absolutely," he says, and he drags Eggsy into him, "absolutely," he says again, and he means it — absolutely.

* * *

Harry barely remembers the drive back to the mews.  

Eggsy's a damp, fast-breathing mess in the passenger seat, slumped against the window and still wild with disbelief. With a tenderness unsuited for a man who routinely dispatches younger-still spies and soldiers into scorpion's dens — or at least, he once did — Harry can't help but to keep Eggsy's hand clasped in his own, so that they share a point of contact, ridiculous as it looks: two sets of fingers together closed over the stick.  

He remembers, a little, the way London travels backward in time from the industrial estate of Aylesbury into the veins and arteries of older streets west of the City. It's properly nearing dawn now, the sky losing the depth of its night into fog gray, a haze that suspends itself over the skylines and rooflines, and the street lights only just flicker off — on — off again, when the Bentley pulls up to the house.

Eggsy in the frame of Harry's house is a startlingly gorgeous contrast. He bites his lip; he hesitates at the front hall; he takes off his atrocious trainers and he tucks his awful cap into the back pocket of his jeans by its brim. He says, "Jesus, Harry," and Harry hears a universe of protestations in four syllables. Eggsy's so brand new: in years, in experiences, in how he wears his bruises with casual grace and seems afraid to touch the walls of Harry's house, and it makes Harry want to break him in. 

Instead, he presses a hand to Eggsy's back instead, palm wide open at the small of his back, directs him toward the downstairs bath. 

"Come on now," Harry says, and he ignores the way the color's gone up in Eggsy's cheeks, how he swallows hard and makes a clicking noise in his throat, how he stumbles a little, in his sock feet on the thick rug, before managing to follow. "Let's clean you up." 

Eggsy says, "It's nothing — just a scrape," and Harry imagines he's spared Eggsy's continued, similar protestations despite his freely bleeding hand only for the way the boy stops dead in his tracks at the sight of Mr. Pickles.

Seizing the momentary distraction, Harry sets Eggsy down on the closed seat of the toilet, and goes to find the first aid kit under in the cupboard under the sink. Eggsy just twists round so he can keep staring at Mr. Pickles, and then whip his head back over to Harry, showing for the first time that night any sense of self preservation and wariness. 

"Izzat a _real_ dog?" Eggsy asks, hesitating.

Harry goes to one knee in front of him, opens the first aid kit and shoves aside the morphine syringes, the epinephrine, the small collection of antivenoms and the half-used up suture kit until he finds the sterile gauze and antiseptic spray.

"Mr. Pickles _was_ a real dog, long ago, before he passed away from pancreatitis," Harry corrects, adding, "This may sting," and deploys the Savlon. 

Eggsy twitches, sucking in a breath through his teeth, but stays admirably still even as Harry presses a clean gauze pad to his hand, begins to bandage it up.

"And wot, after he died you naturally thought havin' him stuffed was the best course action," Eggsy asks, in a way that's not really asking. 

Harry glances upward, mostly so he can see how delightful Eggsy's expression must be at the moment: he looks horrified, half-laughing, profoundly confused. It's extremely delightful — like everything of Eggsy, Harry is finding, it is delightful. 

"It seemed that way at the time," Harry prevaricates, because to explain the vagaries of decisions made in the cold numbness of grief and whatever swill Merlin had distilled in his garden shed seemed too complex and shaming at the moment. 

"This is starting to put your drunkenly sleeping in your car into perspective," Eggsy tells him, tart, but he stays cooperative as Harry inspects the bruises on his face, only gasps a little as Harry dabs iodine onto the cut on his mouth. Shakier, softer, Eggy says, "It's fine, Harry, it's nothing, really."

At work, in the field, Harry has perfect confidence in his ability to appear unaffected, unmoved. Here, on his knees in front of this gorgeous boy, he's clearly failed at this, because Eggsy's face — marred so infuriatingly — is a picture of worry, and Harry must stay quiet too long by half, because Eggsy's raised his hands now, pressed them bandages and all, to Harry's face, as if he's the one in need of comfort. 

"It don't hurt, Harry, promise. Not anymore, yeah?" Eggsy whispers. 

In the weak light of morning, melting into the room in shades of gray and soft orange and pink, Eggsy's eyes are even greener than before. Harry feels silly and young and transported, his heart aching, staring into Eggsy's face. 

Harry knows better than to ask what would have happened tonight if he hadn't been there, to be angry at the way he can imagine the trajectory of the evening. Even without the looming day, it would be absurd, Harry knows — unsuitable. Eggsy's just a boy still, really, not someone to be cloistered away, hoarded like treasure. Not by Harry at least. 

He clears his throat, forces his gaze away and tries not to chase after the warmth of Eggsy's palm as he finally draws his hands away in slow fits and starts. And once Eggsy's fingers stop ghosting at Harry's skin, the pad of his thumb no longer pressed into Harry's throat, where the collar of his shirt is open, Harry reaches for Eggsy's soaked-through jacket, manages to say, "Let's get you in something dry, then," except.

Except Eggsy says, "Fuck it," and Harry only has enough time to look up in understandable alarm before Eggsy's hands curl into the collar of his shirt and drag Harry up into a kiss. 

* * *

* * *

Eggsy hasn't kissed that many people, but he reckons nobody in the world kisses like Harry bloody Hart. 

There'd been a beat, right there in the beginning, when Harry had frozen — his mouth still under Eggsy's — and Eggsy'd felt his heart go dead, still like a tomb. All the blood under his skin had gone to ice and he'd thought, _fuck, fuck, I've fucked it up,_ and gone to pull away, to figure out how to make a run for it. 

And he'd barely managed to choke out, "Fuck, sorry, sorry," before Harry's mouth was on his again, and Eggsy remembers gasping, shocked, and everything after is just blistering, blazing heat.  

Harry uses his teeth when he kisses; he cups Eggsy's face with his massive hands and tilts his head back, gets Eggsy off-kilter, licks into his mouth and swallows every sound Eggsy makes — every sigh and startled noise. Eggsy's mouth is still busted, so it hurts, but even that's aces, even that's fucking brilliant: the sting and the ache of it a constant, continuous reminder that it's real, that Harry's real.

Harry only pulls away so that he can scrape his teeth down the side of Eggsy's neck, and Eggsy's already fucking sprung and running feverish hot. He'll never admit he makes the sound he makes, that he arches into Harry's mouth, pleading, but he does it, trying to drag Harry closer by the back of his shirt.  

Harry must like that, because he — _fuck_ — rewards Eggsy with a _bite_ on his shoulder, teeth sinking into skin, and Eggsy's dizzy just thinking about what a gorgeous bruise will be there, later, how he'll be able to press down on it all week — maybe all month. How it'll go dark and then blue and green, and he hears himself gasp, "Yeah — yeah, Harry, yeah, please," because he wants more and more and Harry's mouth back on his own, Harry's tongue and his teeth and to eat him alive. 

He's got no idea how long this goes for before Harry drags himself away, gasping, his mouth red and his hair a wreck, dark-eyed, to say, "Fuck — stop — " as Eggsy tries to close the distance again " — if we're doing this — " 

" _If_ ," Eggsy spits out. "If you stop I'll kill you, Harry, swear down — "

" — _then we are not doing it in here_ ," Harry finishes, ragged, and stops talking long enough for another kiss: quick, hot, before he's dragging Eggsy up to his feet and out the door of bathroom by the front of his fucking shirt.  

The rest of Harry's house is probably nice, too, like the front hall, but all Eggsy remembers of it is getting slammed into bits of it to be soundly, ferociously kissed, so that Harry can shuck off his jacket and slide his hands underneath Eggsy's shirt, rub over his chest, thumb over his nipples. It takes them fucking _forever_ , to get up the stairs, to navigate the landing, for Eggsy to pluck angrily at the buttons on Harry's shirt until it finally comes open and there's a _fucking A-frame underneath_.  

"Fuckin' hell, Harry," Eggsy swears, and shoves Harry into a second floor bedroom. 

"I'm sorry being properly clothed offends you," Harry says, but he's grinning as he says it, hooking his fingers into the belt loops of Eggsy's jeans and dragging him round — pushing him down onto the bed by his hips.

Eggsy reaches for the A-frame, his nemesis. "All clothes fuckin' offend me right now."

Harry, finally recognizing that Eggsy's on the edge here, lets him, and takes the opportunity to pull off his glasses, toss them on the bedside table where they land with a plasticky noise. Then, hands free, he reaches for the button and zip on Eggsy's jeans and Eggsy forgives himself, for losing the thread there, yeah? 

Harry's an _ex—per—ri—enced_ gentleman, with big hands and long fingers. 

He kisses and kisses Eggsy until Eggsy's dumb and drunk with it, while Harry reaches into the fly of his boxers and gives him a fuckin' squeeze. Eggsy makes some kind of undignified noise at it, but that's fine since Harry's _growling_ into Eggsy's mouth like a beast, rutting the hot weight of his dick into Eggsy's thigh through the fine fabric of his trousers, which, unlike Eggsy's jeans, are still neatly on him. _Fucking unbelievable_.

"Off, off," Eggsy says, in between getting eaten alive, pretty much literally, and Harry has the fucking gall to _laugh_ at him. At least it gets him cooperating — helping Eggsy strip him out of his bloody shirt and his vest.

Underneath all that fine tailoring, Harry's body's a wonder: heavy and corded thick with muscle. Eggsy likes it too much, how Harry's pinning him down, manhandling him, giving him flashes from earlier that night where Eggsy'd watched him take down six of Dean's thugs in 30 seconds, break Poodle's fucking _wrist_. Every time Eggsy's mouth hurts, he feels an answering burst of heat in his belly, at the memory of Harry punching Rottie in the throat. Eggsy don't know shit about Harry, but he know Harry moves like someone who fights for a living, that he's wearin' the ridges and too-smooth skin of scars that Eggsy can feel under his hands — that Harry keeps tellin' Eggsy he's _gorgeous_ and that crushed under Harry, here, Eggsy feels it, feels blissfully, impossibly good.  

Harry decides to celebrate getting Eggsy's jeans off by cupping the backs of Eggsy's knees, pressing open-mouthed kisses to the bruises just comin' in. It's both horrible and so embarrassingly tender Eggsy covers his red face with his stinging hands and moans, "Harry, _Christ_ ," but then, at least, when Harry drags Eggsy's hands away to kiss him again, they're both finally, _finally_ skin to skin. 

"What do you like?" Harry asks him, sucking bruises down Eggsy's chest.  

"Anything," Eggsy says, too far gone to be embarrassed by it. Ten more minutes of this shite and Eggsy's going to rub one out on Harry's thigh, pressed between his legs. "All of it — anything." 

Thank God Harry doesn't do anything fucking mortifying, like ask if Eggsy's ever been with a man before — he's got experience, nothing to crow about, and mostly vertical up against nasty walls in nastier clubs really. Harry just slides down Eggsy's body, swipes his tongue in Eggsy's belly button, and fists the base of Eggsy's dick. _Fuck_.  

Eggsy ends up moaning, "Harry, Harry, _Harry_ ," like a fucking slag of the first order, knees over Harry's shoulders as the man sucks him off slow and wet and _nasty_. Eggsy keeps trying to roll his hips up, and Harry keeps showing off how much fucking stronger he is by keeping him pinned and somehow that's hotter, that's better, and Eggsy just wails and wails and shouts his fury when Harry gives him a warning squeeze at the base of his cock just as Eggsy's about to come — fucking cuts him off mid-orgasm.

"You bastard," Eggsy manages.  

Harry apologizes by sucking sharply on the head of Eggsy's dick — _gah_ — which frankly feels more like additional punishment. "Patience is a virtue," he says when he pulls off, and climbs the length of Eggsy's body again so at least his awful, lush mouth is in kissing distance again so Eggsy figures it's all right.   

Like he's said, mostly Eggsy's fucked blokes upright and half-dressed, messily kissing lads he won't see again. Even with girls, it was giggly and un-intimate, knickers pulled down and bras still up, necking, them bouncing on his cock in pub toilets. Eggsy's never felt this much fucking _skin_ before, he's never spent this much _time_ before, and it's all he can do to take in everything, absorb all of it: the bed underneath him, how his left leg's gone a bit numb from Harry's weight, the scrape of chest hair over his nipples — that's great, keep going with that, Harry, good on you — and how he's stopped needing to breathe in favor of kissing and kissing, his chin soaked and his jaw hurting and his lip sore as fuck. 

Harry's stroking one massive paw down Eggsy's side, and the other's gone off rooting for something. When it comes back, Harry pulls away, ignoring Eggsy's nonverbal bitching in favor of — oh, well, in favor of pouring half a bottle of slick all over his fingers before settling his weight back on top again, reassuring.

Eggsy usually only ever gets hot for people who are a bit mean to him, so Harry's so strange, so fucking strange, kissing him sweet beneath his ear and rubbing one broad, wet thumb down behind Eggsy's bollocks.

He hasn't done this bit, but it's easy to tilt his hips into it, to let his body do it for him, ask for more, since Eggsy's mouth's gone all dry, all the words gone from him. He sets his nails into the meat of Harry's back and tries to rub the tip of his cock into the hard lines of Harry's stomach, listening to his breathing go wonky when Harry's touch catches the rim of his arse, presses on him — into him.

"Open up for me, just like that," Harry is murmuring to him, mouth warm and soft, pressed up to Eggsy's temple, pressing kisses into the corner of his eye. 

It's all Eggsy can do to turn his face into Harry's kisses, to curl his toes into the bedsheets because he's gripping bruises into Harry's muscles, yeah, but Eggsy still feels like he's about to fly apart, needs to hold onto solid and real things as much as possible. He feels like he's that fucking foam on the ocean, that stupid mermaid dissolving, because the way Harry's pressing new spaces into him's nothing like the taut, immediate pleasure of someone's hand on his dick.  

Eggsy feels like paper, soaked through, the fibers and edges coming apart on Harry's fingertips. It's impossibly fucking strange to feel something of someone else inside of him, to feel the sharp ridge of a nail scraping over his hole turn into a dense, abstract _pressure_ inside, to feel it stroking away at him in lazy, waves. It's a lot, it's fucking intense, and Eggsy's glad for Harry's condescending murmuring, how he's whispering, "There you are, lovely, you're doing so well for me, Eggsy," and how he's still kissing the corner of Eggsy's eye — wet and tearing now. It doesn't hurt, it just _aches_ , and it's the kind of sting that Eggsy leans into, wants more of, because he can feel the spark of something fucking incredible just inside of it, inside this feeling like pressing down indulgently, luxuriously on a bruise. 

Maybe it's just cos Eggsy's never had much soft handling, but this is killing him, it's tearing him up, and he says, "Harry, _Harry_ ," so Harry will kiss him and keep him from saying something terrible, that he'll never come back from. And Harry does it, but because maybe he ain't so nice after all, he slicks a third finger in at the same time, swallowing Eggsy's shout, drinking it down and grinning into Eggsy's mouth like a pervert. 

Harry's curling his fingers now, smoothing over and over — _shit oh shit_ — something that makes his cock jump, makes him have to tear away from a kiss to shout, "Oh, _Jesus,_ " and feel himself drooling come with every little rock of Harry's fingers. Eggsy feels the metal of a ring on Harry's hand and the heavy weight of Harry's body and the hot, thick fucking menace of Harry's dick stiff in the crease of Eggsy's hip and he's suddenly so impatient he's mad with it. 

"Now," he tells Harry, biting at his mouth. " _Now,_ get in me, fuck me." 

"Well, I suppose you've been admirably patient," Harry says, because he's a _prick._  

Eggsy's about to bite him, _hard,_ and remind him that in sex it's polite to sound at least as off your head as  the other guy, fuckin' hell, but Harry beats him to it. He sets his teeth in Eggsy's lip, sharp, just long enough that Eggsy gets dizzy with it, before Harry's fingers are gone, replaced by the hot, unrelenting press of something _thick —_ splitting him open.

Eggsy's so fucking glad Harry's kissing him, that Eggsy can just gasp all the undignified, pitchy noises he can feel building in his throat right into Harry's mouth. Because Harry feels massive, fucking _endless_ , heavy and too, too much. Eggsy hitches his legs up, tightens his knees on Harry's sides, because if Harry ever fucking stops, Eggsy'll kill him.

It takes forever, it takes years, maybe, of Harry gripping bruises into Eggsy's hips and pressing lush kisses all over his face, murmuring, "You're doing so well," and "Breathe," and "You're perfect — gorgeous," before Eggsy feels the hot skin of Harry's bollocks pressed up against his arse.  

Eggsy feels as if he's been stretched to breaking — a good hurt he wants more of, that gets him greedy. 

"Are you all right?" Harry asks, an awful thread of tension in his voice, and Eggsy can't help the shiver at that, knowing he's done that, made such a mess of him. 

Eggsy tips his face up to see Harry's eyes are narrowed and his pupils are fucking blown. He looks nothing like the man in his wrinkled suit that Eggsy found, earlier that night; he looks like the dangerous Harry, the one crushin' Poodle's hand and beating the shit out of Dean's guys. Maybe Eggy should be scared, but he thinks he's never been safer than right here: breathless under Harry, opened up for him, gripped tight in his hands.

"I'm good," Eggsy says, and it comes out a hoarse whisper, all low in his throat like another person's voice. But he smiles because he means it, genuinely, and so Harry will stop looking so fucking torn up; Eggsy cups Harry's gorgeous face in his hands and kisses him — says into his mouth, "Come on now — first time's supposed to be memorable, yeah?"

Harry snarls, " _Shit_ ," and where Eggsy had been laughin', it gets swallowed up in a shout, when Harry grips him by the back of his knees, folds him in half, and _Jesus_.

The tilt means that when Harry starts to pull out, thick head of his cock scrapes on Eggsy inside out — rubs something hot and good, makes him go liquid. And when Harry says, "There you are," Eggsy just mumbles, "Fuck off — do that again," and Harry grins and does, does it over and over until Eggsy's all the way hard again, his dick leaking onto his belly and his nipples tight on his chest. Eggsy ends up with his fingers fisting the short hair at the base of Harry's neck, gasping, " _Yeah, yeah, yeah_ ," because it's all he can say, and no matter how he rocks his arse back, Harry's already deep as he'll go, the base of his cock a well satisfying stretch and the thickness of it inside fucking an ache into Eggsy's gut he wants to keep raw, wide open. 

Harry kisses like a fucking maniac, and when he's not fucking Eggsy's mouth soft and breathless he's latching onto Eggsy's chest, leaving dark, red bruises — scraping his teeth over Eggsy's nipples and sucking until Eggsy's yelling, hoarse, kicking his heels into Harry's flanks. 

Eggsy keeps reaching a free hand down to touch himself, but it's too much, too too much every time, with the way Harry's kissing his neck and pressing a hand low on Eggsy's belly, so that he's getting it inside and out, so that his face is wet and he's gritting his teeth it's so good. He can just about lie here with his ankles locked around Harry's hips and claw at his back, listen to the wet slap and slide of skin and beg, "please, please, please, Harry, please," and that's all — that's all he can do. 

"Will you come for me, Eggsy?" Harry asks, too demanding to be polite, and now he's fuckin' wrapping his hand around Eggsy's cock, not fisting him, just pressing under the head and stroking his thumb in slow, cum-wet circles. 

Eggsy would tell him yeah, he'll come, just — give him a sec, his whole body's turned up to 14 right now, but Harry's an impatient shit, just shoves his cock in to the base again and _grinds_ , puts his mouth next to Eggsy's ear and pants:

"Let me feel you come on my cock, darling."  

Eggsy doesn't say, "yeah, for you, Harry," but only because he's fucking _wailing._

He feels like a star going supernova, something punched out of him, and he knows he's gripping bloody welts into Harry's skin but it's how he's holding on while he seizes inside-out. It's so fucking good it's actually painful, every nerve ending gone into overdrive, and Eggsy can feel Harry stripping his dick and the hot ropes of his own jizz hitting his chest and his chin. It runs parallel to the scream inside his gut from the way Harry's _still fucking him_ , the mushroom head of his dick still rubbing Eggsy from the inside and Harry's hand still pressing him from outside and his orgasm blows outward like a volcanic eruption — decimating — until he's just skin and half-sobbing noises. 

Eggsy doesn't know how long it goes, until he's just reflex responses, his legs gone lax and sliding down, his body still split open, Harry still churning him apart. It goes from too much — "You're doing so well, Eggsy, you're so lovely," Harry had told him, rubbing at the soft skin between his fucked-out hole and his balls — to something less heated, good, a used-up ache radiating from between his thighs, Harry still pressed deep into his belly, his cock twitching, hips stroking slowly in and out.

Bleary, Eggsy mumbles, "You come?" and Harry kisses his forehead, the lids of his eyes, murmurs, "Not yet, darling," and pulls out to put Eggsy on his belly.

The rub of the sheets on Eggsy's dick is exquisite torture, and he only has a second to whine about it before Harry's pressing his cock back inside — sighing as the head pops in and Eggsy arse rocks backward, instinctive, taking him deep. Harry rewards him with a kiss at the knob of Eggsy's spine for that, and Eggsy wants to say he makes Harry get off him or complains about being sore but actually he just melts into linens and lets Harry fuck him into the mattress.  

He's too sensitive for it, but he likes it: Harry's weight on his back, how he can make Harry hiss if he tightens down, Harry's teeth in his shoulder. He likes reaching back and gripping the thick muscle of Harry's thigh, how when Eggsy lets out a noise he can feel Harry's dick _twitch_. So yeah, Eggsy'll have this, thanks, lie here blissed out and fucked apart, let Harry have him.

The second time, when it starts to build from the nagging sweetness under the overstimulated ache, well — that's a fucking surprise. Eggsy says something nonsense, something like, "oh, oh, fuck, no," and his whole body shakes, because this feels much more like a knife edge than the first, more hurt than good, and every time Harry's hips snap into his arse Eggsy feels Harry's balls wet against his taint and it sends a judder through him: anticipatory. 

Eggsy fists his hands in the sheets. He can't come again. He already knows it'll be too much. "Shit — shit, Harry, I'm — "

"Just one more for me," Harry bargains, presses open-mouthed kisses to Eggsy's neck and presses down on him, full-body, before dragging them over onto their sides. "You can — I know it — you can, for me, Eggsy."

" _Fuck_ , you fucking prick," Eggsy yells at him, but then Harry's giving his bollocks a rub and that's it — he's gone. 

The next time Eggsy surfaces vaguely into awareness it's because Harry's wiping him down with a cool flannel and kissing his ankles, fucking sap, and Eggsy ignores the way that makes his heart seize up in his throat to reach for him — grabby. 

"Hello," Harry says, lets himself get grabbed; the flannel goes over the side of the bed.

Eggsy looks and looks into Harry's face: red from fucking, sweat on his forehead and welled up in above the bow of his upper lip, grinning wildly. All the tension from tonight — from the cigarettes in front of Battersea Power Station and the conversation about his mobile to Dean's boys in the car park — it's all bled out of him.

Eggsy's probably smiling like a fucking idiot, grinnin' up at Harry.  

"Hello," Eggsy says, because he fells welled up, overflowing, with a sense of jubilant, fucking idiotic _bliss_. He's a mess, and it's all he can do to shift until Harry's back on top of him in the vee of his legs — and it's nice, just a little zing, no heat, to feel Harry's dick pressed into his own — and put his hands in Harry's curls. "You better have come that time, bruv."  

Eggsy remembers gripping at Harry's hand on his stomach, the way it felt to clench around Harry's cock, and how he'd felt his prick drool out another load, his whole body gone tight. He remembers Harry throwing Eggsy's thigh over his own, so that he was opened up wide. He remembers saying he wanted to feel Harry come, please come, come inside him, and Harry swearing his name and turning Eggsy's head for a kiss before he'd gone still, balls drawn up tight and pressed atom to atom with Eggsy's skin—Eggsy doesn't really remember what it feels like, having Harry come inside him; he wishes he did. 

Harry promises, "Yes, Eggsy," but he says it laughing, says it slipping a hand between Eggsy and the sheets to press open-palmed at the base of his spine, to pitch him closer and to kiss him: hot and brief. 

"S'okay if I close my eyes a bit?" Eggsy asks, because it's polite to ask, yeah? "I'll get up in a minute, promise." 

Harry puts a hand over Eggsy's drooping eyes, presses a kiss over the bridge of his nose — so fucking embarrassing, the way Eggsy feels himself shiver into it, tucking himself in closer, so fucking shameless. 

But Harry just says, "Go to sleep, Eggsy," and Eggsy does, drops right off, like stepping into the deep part of the ocean — down, down down. 

* * *

* * *

Harry wakes up to the sound of his house phone ringing off — the horrendous jangle of it paired with some Norwegian death metal that's been programmed into his mobile.

So Harry's first words of the day are, "Merlin, you absolute _wanker_."

" _Jesus_ ," says — Eggsy, Christ. Says Eggsy, who is still a warm weight in his arms. 

He has creases on his lovely face, flushed pink from sleep, his eyes and his mouth soft from it, and Harry has already laced a hand into the wild strands of his hair before thinking better of it, just to touch him. Harry ought to know better, of course, but the primary animating drivers of his life have been a complete unwillingness to listen to pragmatic counsel or his own good judgment. 

"Uh, morning, I guess," Eggsy manages, going red, his throat darkening with a blush.  

It's marvelous, and makes Harry wonder if it's the first time Eggsy's ever woken up in someone's bed. Has he never stayed over before — enjoyed the sticky filth of a fuck the next morning, stretching into all the aches from the night before? Harry's as bad a man as Merlin's always accused, he supposes abstractly, because it just makes him to put his teeth there and listen to Eggsy _moan,_ to darken the bruises that have risen gorgeously to the surface of his skin.

Instead, and with enormous restraint, Harry contents himself by setting his knee between Eggsy's thighs to rub teasingly over his morning erection.  

"Morning," he says, all pleasantness, and presses a quick, closed-mouthed kiss over Eggsy's probably vile stream of invective as the boy ruts into Harry's thigh. Excellent. 

The two phones — ringing continuously, so they go into and out of one another asynchronously — are now joined by the front doorbell, which reverberates throughout the house with a reserved chime: the deep satisfying sound of a singing bowl.

"Fuckin' hell, Harry, d'you rob a fuckin' bank?" Eggsy asks him, annoyed but clearly not enough to stop rubbing his cock against Harry's leg. 

Harry says, "Not as such," into Eggsy's shoulder, and he's considering how distracted Eggsy would have to be to ignore the riot of noise around them when a profoundly frustrated and angry knocking joins din.

"Right," Eggsy says, giving Harry a shove. He's still grinning, wild and gorgeous. "Who'd you kill? Fess up."

_For you? I'd kill a hundred people_ , Harry thinks, but forebears. He supposes a man is only ever the product of his forbears, and Harry has unfortunate genealogy.

"If only it was murder," Harry sighs wistfully. Murder, he could manage quite simply, with falsified papers and a reasonable expectation that he would have only killed out of necessity or in pursuit of the protection of the state. 

Eggsy stares at him, brow arched. "You're a fucking weirdo, Harry," he says, solemn.

The banging downstairs grew louder: menacing, ominous. 

"Right, get up," Eggsy tells him, starting to roll away from Harry's reach. There's something wretched and shaking in his voice, and the boy has looked deliberately away with such intent that Harry hardly needs his literal spy training to see the fissures and cracks, the spaces where doubt has already crept in. "Before they bang down your fuckin' door, yeah?"

Harry can't keep Eggsy, the way someone clearly ought to, to keep him insulated from the rough edges of his life. He can barely keep the promises he made to himself; there are other oaths upon which he must hold fast. So it's all he can do to drag Eggsy back toward him, back into their temporary reprieve and kiss him once more: lingering and sweet. It starts bruising and it goes soft at the edges, with the noise Eggsy makes, and Harry finds himself cupping the boy's cheek and overwhelmed with tenderness for him, gone breathless with it, until they part — breathing hard.

"Eggsy," Harry says finally, because the knocking downstairs sounds angrier by the beat, "there's something I ought to tell you." 

Eggsy looks dazed. He nods, mute and accepting.

"Those phone calls last night? It's the same people knocking now," he elaborates. 

"Shit," Eggsy mumbles. "You're married."

"I'm — well, to be king," Harry corrects. 

"You could just admit you're a fuckin' cheater, yeah?" Eggsy says, but he doesn't sound convinced of his own theory. "Last night you was actin' like it was your last night before going down."

Harry has no idea, really, who Buckingham Palace has seat to drag him kicking and screaming to King Edward's Chair, and he can't imagine that Eggsy needs to become embroiled in the lesser work of Moliere that is Harry's existence. Maybe more than that, and more selfishly, Eggsy knows Harry Hart who owns a ravishing car and parks it unwisely, who invites strange and gorgeous boys to drive it too fast. Eggsy may be beautiful and pink-cheeked, all sleek muscle and slim hips, but he's also explosive laughter and the memory of risking death and loss of limb driving too fast over the rivers of London. Harry had known even last night, known all along, he could never hope to keep Eggsy — he'll keep this memory instead.  

"I've no interest in it, never had, all my life," Harry goes on. "But it's too important to ignore, and there are apparently no other viable candidates."

"You're fucking serious," Eggsy says, flatly horrified, and Harry — with years now of similarly uncomfortable morning-after confrontations — recognizes this as the moment to draw himself away and find his discarded trousers from last night and shirt.

The thread of Eggsy's total disbelief continues through the ritual replacement of discarded clothing. Eggsy's pants had ended up behind the headboard, which was impressive if baffling, and the continuous drone of the ringing phones and affronted knocking made a fitting score for the entire process.

"So what, 've you got like, a garden I should escape through?" Eggsy asks, limping downstairs after Harry, who was informed by Eggsy at the landing he was courting physical violence if he expressed any further outward smugness. 

Harry imagines how well that'd go: Eggsy's current well-fucked hooligan get-up tramping over the massive hedge and fence of his garden and probably right onto bloody Holmes's back patio. Eggsy would be sniped in 2 seconds from a distance of 200 yards.

"Nonsense, you'll exit via the front door once you're ready to depart," Harry says lightly, because he can think of no other viable alternative and at this point this day is already an unmitigated disaster.  

Eggsy's reply is made in part by his face, which is arranged in a rictus of complete disgust. "Bruv, that's pretty cold to your old lady."

Fittingly, they're at the door now, and Harry closes his hand around the knob — the biometric sensors disengaging the lock — so that he can say, "Eggsy, I really am meant to be king," as he draws it open to the black-suited phalanx of literal courtiers and palace staff clustered on his front step — each one angrier than the last.

**Author's Note:**

> For the curious, this is [Harry's car](http://www.rmauctions.com/lots/lot.cfm?lot_id=1068218).


End file.
